According to Mimetic Theory, the sacrificial victim gets both a
negative and positive valence. He or she is blamed for the turmoil
and unrest but then also gets credit for the peace that ensues,
often even before the sacrifice is made since the sacrificial
institution anticipates the outcome. It seems strange to us, but it
truly helps to interpret the anthropological data.

One can see this same bi-valence, for instance, in the
polytheistic pantheons of gods. Some are trouble-makers who sow
chaos; some are bringers and keepers of societal order; and some
are both.

Girard theorizes that the role of priest/king arose in ancient
cultures out of the positive valence attached to the sacrificial
victims. A prospective sacrificial victim could use the prestige
to garnish an office of continuing to supply the sacrificial
institution with victims. The priest/king role slowly evolves,
then, as the presiders over the institutions of sacrifice
themselves. One has to remember that these things developed over
millennia, beginning in very primitive ritual settings. But,
again, the thesis truly helps to synthesize the wide ranging data,
from the practice of indigenous African tribes to the fall of the
monarchy to democracy; see the Gil Bailie examples below.

Resources

1. René Girard, Violence
and
the Sacred, pp. 104ff., and Things Hidden, pp.
51ff. On page 107 of Violence and the Sacred, for
example, Girard writes, “The king reigns only by virtue of his
future death; he is no more and no less than a victim awaiting
sacrifice, a condemned man about to be executed.”

Sometimes the length of [the new king's] reign is fixed
from the start: the kings of Jukun . . . originally ruled for
seven years. Among the Bambara the newly elected king
traditionally determined the length of his own reign. “A strip of
cotton was put round his neck and two men pulled the ends in
opposite directions whilst he himself took out of a calabash as
many pebbles as he could grasp in his hand. These indicated the
number of years he would reign, on the expiration of which he
would be strangled.”

One of Gil Bailie's other favorite references when it comes to
kingship is this description of the guillotine gone wild following
the beheading of King Louis XIV of France. It is from H. G. Wells, The
Outline of History (Garden City, N.Y: Garden City Books,
1961), 2:725:

The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and a steady
slaughtering began .... The invention of the guillotine was
opportune to this mood. The queen was guillotined, and most of
Robespierre’s antagonists were guillotined; atheists who argued
that there was no Supreme Being were guillotined; Danton was
guillotined because he thought there was too much guillotine; day
by day, week by week, this infernal new machine chopped off heads
and more heads and more. The reign of Robespierre lived, it
seemed, on blood, and needed more and more, as an opium-taker
needs more and more opium.

3. S. Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice,
pages 48ff. I continue to highly recommend Heim's book as one of the
best applications of Mimetic Theory to Christian theology. His
explication of MT is excellent -- witnessed by the following
explanation of the bi-valence of sacred violence and how kingship
issues from it:

The sacrificed subject is the object of both
condemnation and honor.

This contradictory situation makes sense in Girard’s view. The
sacrificial mechanism produces this polarity, since the victim
is viewed as powerful and holy, because capable of producing
such benevolent results, but also eminently deserving of death
for having transgressed the most profound commandments. One will
search in vain for a consistent list of features inherent to the
entities classified in the category of “the sacred,” even though
the category itself exists in all cultures. Girard claims to see
the explanation for both the differences and the commonality.
Persons are not chosen to be killed because they are sacred,
because they belong to some special if elusive class. They are
“sacred” because they are chosen to be killed. It is designation
for sacrifice, by whatever formula, that constitutes something
as sacred. Designated victims are holy because their death has a
supernatural, reconciling power.

The great anthropologists catalogued innumerable variations on
this process. In some cases it is a king or a priest who
ritually transgresses the most awful taboos as a preliminary to
being sacrificed (literally or figuratively) to renew the
people. In other cases it is a prisoner of war, an outcast, or a
common criminal who is elevated to a place of honor and rendered
all manner of service prior to sacrifice. This model is well
known from the Aztec example. What prisoners of war from outside
a society and kings who rule in it have in common is that they
can easily be isolated, the one by their strangeness and the
other by their eminence (kings belong to a class that by
definition has only one member). Ideal sacrificial victims must
be without ties or supporters that would stand in the way of
their execution, but their identification with the community
must be sufficient so as to embody the evil, the polluting crime
to be purged with their destruction. The cause of the
sacrificial crisis is to be found somewhere within the community
itself, but in someone whose supposed offense removes any
possible ties or sympathy. The contrary treatments of the
criminal and the king thus point in the same ultimate direction,
meeting the requirements of the sacred. The king, who is a
consummate insider, must be dramatically separated and
condemned, while the prisoner of war, who already bears the onus
of a criminal or enemy, must be adopted in such a manner as to
have a veneer of identity with his captors.

The disorienting inconsistency in the condemnation and honor
extended to the victim is understandable in light of those two
essential if paradoxical qualities of the sacred: the
transgressions that rightly merit sacrifice and the honor due
one whose death saves society. Girard suggests that only such an
insight can make sense of data like an African investiture hymn
for a king that contains the following formula.

You are a turd,
You are a heap of refuse,
You have come to kill us,
You have come to save us. (pp. 48-49)

4. For more on the sacrifice of kings as the founding event for
democracy, see Robert Hamerton-Kelly's "The King and the
Crowd: Divine Right and Popular Sovereignty in the French
Revolution" (Contagion,
Spring 1996, pp. 67-84). If the American Revolution seems a more
civilized affair than the French one, consider that in America the
king's army was sacrificed as a substitute for the king to give
birth to democracy. Was the madness of the guillotine worse than the
slaughter of many innocent British soldiers in substitution for the
king?

1. N. T. Wright, The
New Testament and the People of God, p. 322. In
general, Wright's work on the Book of Daniel is the key to this
first volume in his monumental project of "Christian Origins and
the Question of God." "First-Century Jewish Monotheism," pp.
248-259 in this first volume, and all of chapter ten, "The Hope of
Israel," are the most essential reading from this book for setting
up what is to come in the subsequent volumes.

In "First-Century Jewish Monotheism," for example, Wright
addresses the charge that Jewish apocalyptic falls into dualisms
that betray monotheism. His sorting
through
the various senses of “duality” (excerpt) goes a long
way to set the record straight. Does it help, for example, when
confronted in this text with the "duality" between those who are
raised to everlasting life, as opposed to those raised to shame
and everlasting contempt?

Chapter Ten, "The Hope of Israel," focuses on a wholistic reading
of Daniel, in order to set the record straight on Jewish
apocalyptic. As mentioned in the introduction above, one of his
central points addresses what has traditionally been interpreted
(by Schweitzer, for example) as "end of the world" thinking. In my
opinion, Wright couldn't be more clear and convincing in leading
to the conclusion:

There is, I suggest, no good evidence to suggest
anything so extraordinary as the view which Schweitzer and his
followers espoused. As good creational monotheists, mainline Jews
were not hoping to escape from the present universe into some
Platonic realm of eternal bliss enjoyed by disembodied souls after
the end of the space-time universe. If they died in the fight for
the restoration of Israel, they hoped not to ‘go to heaven’, or at
least not permanently, but to be raised to new bodies when the
kingdom came, since they would of course need new bodies to enjoy
the very much this-worldly shalom, peace and prosperity
that was in store. (p. 286)

Consider the popular Christian views of heaven, or the "end of the
world." According to Wright's analysis, are they Platonist or
Jewish? Wright ended up taking the planned conclusion to Vol. 2 (Jesus and the Victory of God)
regarding resurrection and turning it into an 800-page Vol. 3, The Resurrection of the Son of
God, because the issue of popular Christian views on the
after-life is so important.

2. N. T. Wright, his latest two books on the Historical
Jesus: Simply
Jesus and How
God Became King. See more below
from these two books on Jesus the King under the Gospel reflections.

3. Brian McLaren, Everything
Must Change, p.98. In a section about how the Gospels
present Jesus in counter-imperial narratives, McLaren outlines
twelve critical features. After explaining the significance of the
title Messiah, or Christ, he gives an excellent
summary of the title Son of Man, leaning heavily on Daniel
7:

“Son of Man.” Similarly, the fascinating and
complex term Son of Man (used by Jesus eighty-one times in
the Gospels — see Mark 8:31, for example, where the term is used
in parallel to the term Christ) evokes a dream of
liberation from the book of Daniel. Daniel was written in the
context of empire (ostensibly in the Babylonian and Medo-Persian
empires, but more likely, some scholars would say, in the later
Greek and Syrian empires). The book of Daniel churns with the
life-and-death challenge of living unbowed within a hostile
imperial narrative, and it elicits dreams of liberation from all
empires. Daniel recounts a vision in which one “like a son of man”
approaches “the Ancient of Days” (God) and is given “authority,
glory, and sovereign power; all peoples, nations, and people of
every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting
dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will
never be destroyed” (7:13-14). Later, significantly, this kingdom
is identified as being “handed over to the saints,” and is
described as the kingdom of God in contrast to the Assyrian,
Babylonian, Greek, and Roman kingdoms or empires (v. 27). Each use
of “Son of Man” nearly glows when this rich context is brought to
it. (Note: I might add that the phrase son of man could be
poetically interpreted as follows: son means next
generation or new generation, and man means
humanity. So son of man would mean new
generation of humanity, or perhaps even new kind of
humanity or new stage in the development of humanity.
The term would resonate with Paul’s terms Second Adam and
new humanity [Romans 5:12-6:7; Ephesians 4:22-24;
Colossians 3:9]).

I'm especially drawn to McLaren's translation as new
generation of humanity, which resonates with Mimetic
Theory's take that Christ, the Son of Man, begins a new chapter in
anthropology for homo sapiens, one that generates
reconciliation and unity instead of brokenness and division.

4. Walter Wink, The
Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of Man,
and his posthumously published autobiography (with Steven
Berry), Just
Jesus: My Struggle to Become Human. Wink, an early
participant in COV&R,
captures well the import of the anthropological revelation in
Jesus the Messiah. For example:

And this is the revelation: God is HUMAN … It is the
great error of humanity to believe that it is human. We are only
fragmentarily human, fleetingly human, brokenly human. We see
glimpses of our humanness, we can only dream of what a more human
existence and political order would be like, but we have not yet
arrived at true humanness. Only God is human, and we are made in
God’s image and likeness — which is to say, we are capable of
becoming human. (Just Jesus, p. 102; par. in The Human
Being, p. 26)

Isn't this a fine way to highlight the importance of Mimetic Theory,
as it bridges the Christ revelation with modern anthropology?

Reflections and Questions

1. How does this passage square with the king who came not lord
it over others like the Gentile kings, and to be served, but to
serve (Mark 10:35-45, a lectionary passage from Proper 24B)? It provides a crucial
follow-up to the element in Mark's presentation of Jesus of a king
who serves -- a good way to wrap-up the year of Mark's Gospel.

John 18:33-37

Exegetical Notes

1. There is a word group for truth in Greek that consists of the
noun itself, aletheia; two different adjectives ("true"),
alethes and alethinos; and an adverb ("truly"), alethes.
There are 55 occurrences of this word group in the Gospel of John!

2. The heaviest concentration in John of the word group for truth
occurs in chapter 8, where we encounter this very important
Girardian passage (John 8:44-45):

You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do
your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and
does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.
When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a
liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do
not believe me.

Jesus, whose entire reason for being is "to testify to the truth"
(18:37), contrasts himself with the devil, the father of lies and a
murderer from the beginning. His witness before Pilate comes moments
before they will murder him. Isn't this how Jesus is testifying to
the truth? By exposing the devil as the father of lies and as a
murderer from the beginning? The Girardian anthropology helps us to
see how it is that we have fallen under a paternity of murder, how
it is that our very cultures and societies which shape us are
founded in murder. Jesus came to offer us another paternity with his
heavenly Father, the source of all truth and life.

3. The closest parallels in the synoptics to John 8:44 is a Q
passage in which Jesus basically accuses the Jewish leaders of
continuing in along line of murders from the beginning, going all
the way to Abel. Those passages are Matthew 23:34-35 and Luke
11:49-51. The Lukan version is:

Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, 'I will send them
prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute,'
so that this generation may be charged with the blood of all the
prophets shed since the foundation of the world, from the blood of
Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and
the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be charged against this
generation.

Link here for a 1997 sermon, entitled "Born to Live the Truth," that
makes use of this Q passage along with John 8 to unravel what Jesus
might have meant by the truth as he stood before Pilate.

4. The Greek word lethe means forgetful. With the "a" as
a prefix, the etymology of aletheia, or truth, would seem
to be literally to not be forgetful, or to stop forgetting. Gil
Bailie often points this out in his studies of John. This
has a loaded meaning for John 8. To come out from under the
influence of the father of lies would be to stop forgetting the
truth. It also has a powerful meaning to many psychologies of
trauma in which a person's psyche buries the memories for a time;
for an abused person, for example, whose memories often stay
buried for years until later years when they stop forgetting, when
the truth comes out.

5. John 18:37: "For this I was born, and for this I came into the
world, to testify to the truth." This is reminiscent of John 9:39:
"I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see
may see, and those who do see may become blind." Jesus "came into
the world" for judgment and for testifying to the truth.
These two are related through the Girardian interpretation that
poses the truth of who we are as human beings as fundamentally
rooted in the mimetic power of the accusatory gesture which
underlies all our institutions of judgment. Through the judgment
of Jesus Christ and his execution on the cross, God judges our
judging. God exposes our systems of judgment as fundamentally
sinful -- as the core of original sin. Helpful to this point is Gil
Bailie's exegesis of John 19:13 (see lecture notes below).
John's text is ambiguous such that it could be read as Pilate
sitting Jesus down on the judge's bench -- which thus switches
their roles. It is Pilate being judged as he judges Jesus.

6. Key is the meaning of "my kingdom is not of this world." The
Greek is: hē basileia hē emē ouk estin
ek tou kosmou toutou. The key word, ek, has the
meaning "out of" or "from." Very often it has simply been
translated as "of." The NRSV translates it as "from." N. T. Wright
in his John
for Everyone: Chapters 11-21 (pp. 112-16) also
translates it as "from," and says,

Please note, he doesn’t say, as some translations have
put it, ‘my kingdom is not of this world’; that would
imply that his ‘kingdom’ was altogether other-worldly, a spiritual
or heavenly reality that had nothing to do with the present world
at all. That is not the point. Jesus, after all, taught his
disciples to pray that God’s kingdom would come ‘on earth as in
heaven.’

No: the point is that Jesus’ kingdom does not come from
‘this world.’ Of course it doesn’t. ‘The world,’ as we’ve seen
again and again, is in John the source of evil and rebellion
against God. Jesus is denying that his kingdom has a this-worldly
origin or quality. He is not denying that it has a
this-worldly destination. That’s why he has come into the
world himself (verse 37), and why he has sent, and will send, his
followers into the world (17.18; 20.21). His kingdom doesn’t come
from this world, but it is for this world. That is the crucial
distinction. (pp. 114-15)

2. In my sermon 1997 Proper 28B sermon "The End of the World?"), I
spoke of the end of the law. I found it interesting that the place
in which James Alison cites John 18:31 (just before this
Sunday's gospel text), in The
Joy of Being Wrong, is in connection with his
discussion of the end of the law. I thought I'd share about a page
with you. To set it up, Alison is continuing his extrapolation of
the insights that were coming upon the apostles prompted by the
resurrection and has arrived at the ways in which the apostolic
experience of sin has been reshaped around the reality of
forgiveness. He begins with a discussion of John 9, the story of
the man born blind (similar to his discussion in the Contagion
article this past spring), and concludes: "The passages I have
indicated bear clear witness to John having understood as one of
the first fruits of the resurrection the making available of the
understanding that we are all wrong (blind), and that this does
not matter. Being wrong can be forgiven: it is insisting on being
right that confirms our being bound in original murderous sin.
"From there, he moves to St. Paul's demythification of the divine
wrath in Romans, making a similar point as the one just quoted:
those who insist on their own righteousness are the ones who
suffer wrath, but it is not a divine wrath; it is the wrath of
their own sacrificial machinery, bolstered by their own insistence
on being righteous. It is into that discussion that the following
fits:

The next factor in the Pauline testimony is not only the
revelation of human idolatry, but its universal quality. This is
abundantly illustrated in the first three chapters of Romans where
Paul is keen to illustrate precisely that: "all men, both Jews and
Greeks, are under the power of sin." (Rom. 3:9)

It is not only sin that is universal, but for anyone who
believes in the goodness of God that has been made manifest in
the handing over of Jesus and then his raising up, then
righteousness is universally available. It is of course the same
insight that has brought the understanding of wrath to its
sharpest definition -- the killing of the son of God -- that has
made it possible to be set free from wrath. This is the import
of 5:9: "Since therefore we are now justified by his blood, much
more shall we be saved by him from the wrath." The true
understanding of wrath came about exactly at the same moment as
there emerged the possibility of being freed from it: it is the
forgiveness of the resurrection which defines the nature of sin.

This of course leads Paul into a highly complex series of
arguments about the Law which it is not the place to follow
here. However, it seems important to indicate that it is
precisely from his understanding of the universal nature of the
sinfulness of humanity that he understands that Law, which is in
itself holy (7:12), has become a function of that sinfulness. In
the first place, the law brings about knowledge of sin (3:20)
just as it also bears witness to the righteousness of God, along
with the prophets (3:21). However, it does not only serve as an
epistemological instrument, in the good sense of letting people
know what sin is. It is an instrument of wrath (4:15). That is
to say, that the knowledge of sin that it brings about, rather
than being salvific, becomes part of the sinful human world of
mutual judgment and recrimination. At least where there is no
law, there is no transgression.

Paul indicates however that the law actually increases sin
(5:20). It is hard not to read 5:21 as indicating that the
increase of sin produced by the law was made manifest in the
death of Jesus ("sin reigned in death"), while the resurrection
brought about that "grace might reign through righteousness".
Paul goes even further with this line of thought in 7:5, where
the law again has an active role in arousing sin. I would
suggest that this verse is wrongly interpreted if "flesh" is
taken in the modern debased sense (i.e. basically sexual). It
seems far more probable (and in line with Pauline usage; cf.,
Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, pp. 120-9, 146-50) that
"flesh" means "within the Jewish religious framework", and that
the sinful passions in question, rather than lust etc. mean the
persecutory zeal which led Paul to persecute Christians -- that
is, the zeal which was at work in his members to bear fruit for
death.

We can therefore see something very similar to the (much
clearer) Johannine analysis above: sin is universal, and easily
forgiven through faith in the God who raised Jesus from the
dead. So the blind man (and thus blindness from the beginning)
was easily cured. However, there is the complicating factor of
the law, which appears to enable people to be just by knowing
good and evil (the pharisees in Jn 9 who 'could see'). In fact,
not only does the law not permit people to become just, but it
locks them further into wrath, which is the judgmental attitude
of those who think they have a superior knowledge, leading them
to involvement in persecution and death, just as it had lead
Paul himself. That is to say, rather than sin being overcome by
the law, it is compounded by it, making sin even more lethal. So
the Johannine pharisees are driven deeper into blindness by
their pretensions of sight. And of course, as in John (cf., the
ironic juxtaposition of Jn18:31 and 19:7), the paradigm for the
law being wrong is the death of Christ. Where for John the death
of Christ revealed the structuring mechanism of sin at work in
the authorities, in Paul it reveals the complicity of the law
with sin, and thus, finally the caducity of the law. Paul
explicitly says that: "Christ is the end of the law that every
one who has faith maybe justified." (Rm 10:4) He is the "end" of
course in multiple senses,one of which for Paul is that the law
achieved its purpose in leading to Christ's death, thus
revealing definitively the true nature of sin whose accomplice
it had been -- that is exactly what is said by 7:13. Having
fulfilled its ambiguous purpose, the law is now at an end, now
that righteousness is made available by faith in Christ. (The
Joy of Being Wrong, pp.128-130)

For the reader's convenience, let me juxtapose the two verses as
Alison suggests. John 18:31:

Pilate said to them, "Take him yourselves and judge him
according to your law." The Jews replied, "We are not permitted to
put anyone to death."

And John 19:7:

The Jews answered him, "We have a law, and according to
that law he ought to die because he has claimed to be the Son of
God."

In Simply
Jesus, Wright's main metaphor is that of the Perfect
Storm. Using the image from the book and movie of that name, he
points to the coming together of three winds in history: the Jewish
hopes for liberation from their many oppressors, the current Roman
imperial oppressor, and Jesus the Messiah inaugurating God's promise
of liberation but not in the expected manner. John 18-19 is an
encapsulation of this perfect, Rome's violent military power vs.
God's liberating power, but not in the manner of long-time Jewish
hopes because it is nonviolent. Wright's first elaboration of this
passage states,

These advance hints [in the Farewell Discourse of John
14-17] enable us to understand John’s explanation, the fullest in
any of our accounts, of what is at stake when Jesus stands before
the Roman governor. The scene in John 18-19 has the hallmarks of
the kind of hearing we might expect in a Roman provincial court,
and it is this confrontation that lies at the heart of both the
political and the theological meaning of the kingdom of God. Jesus
has announced God’s kingdom and has also embodied it in what he
has been doing. But it is a different sort of kingdom from
anything that Pilate has heard of or imagined: a kingdom without
violence (18:36), a kingdom not from this world, but
emphatically, through the work of Jesus, for this world.
(The routine misunderstanding of the kingdom as “otherworldly” has
been generated by the translation “My kingdom is not of
this world”; but that is certainly not what John means, and it
isn’t what Jesus meant either.) (p. 183)

Even more interesting for supporters of Mimetic Theory is the
meaning of the cross that Wright begins to glean from this passage,
and from his exposition of the Historical Jesus, in general. What
Jesus comes to reveal to us is that our oppressors, like Rome,
aren't the real enemy. Jesus' teaching around the Satan, the
Accuser, is crucial for Wright. He would greatly benefit from the
full anthropology of MT when he says,

Rome provided the great gale, and the distorted
ambitions of Israel the high-pressure system, but the real enemy,
to be met head-on by the power and love of God, was the
anti-creation power, the power of death and destruction, the force
of accusation, the Accuser who lays a charge against the whole
human race and the world itself that all are corrupt and decaying,
that all humans have contributed to this by their own idolatry and
sin. The terrible thing is that this charge is true. All humans
have indeed worshipped what is not divine and so have failed to
reflect God’s image into the world. They, and creation, are
therefore subject to corruption and death. At this level the
Accuser is absolutely right.

But the Accuser is wrong to imagine that this is the creator’s
last word. What we see throughout Jesus’s public career is that he
himself is being accused — accused of being a blasphemer by the
self-appointed thought police, accused of being out of his mind by
his own family, even accused by his followers of taking his
vocation in the wrong direction. All the strands of evil
throughout human history, throughout the ancient biblical story,
come rushing together as the gospels tell the story of Jesus, from
the demons shrieking at him in the synagogue to the sneering
misunderstanding of the power brokers to the frailty and folly of
his own friends and followers. Finally, of course — and this is
the point in the story to which the evangelists are drawing our
attention — he is accused in front of the chief priests and the
council and in the end by the high priest himself He is accused of
plotting against the Temple; he is accused of forbidding the
giving of tribute to Caesar (a standard ploy of revolutionaries);
he is accused of claiming to be king of the Jews, a rebel leader;
he is accused of blasphemy, of claiming to be God’s son.
Accusations come rushing together from all sides, as the leaders
accuse Jesus before Pilate; and Pilate finally does what all the
accusations throughout the gospel have been demanding and has him
crucified. Jesus, in other words, has taken the accusations that
were outstanding against the world and against the whole human
race and has borne them in himself. That is the point of the story
the way the evangelists tell it. (pp. 186-87)

Wright's final reference to John 18:33-37 in Simply Jesus
comes in commenting on an expectation and hope of the earliest
Christians, "The Return of Jesus." Quoting several paragraphs would
again be helpful:

“Look out of the window,” say the skeptics. “If you
think Jesus is already installed as king of the world, why is the
world still such a mess?” Fair question. But actually the story so
far — even the story of the ascension itself — is not designed to
make the sort of claim to which that sort of objection would pose
an ultimate problem. Even the story of Jesus’s resurrection and
his going into “heaven” are only the beginning of something new,
something that will be completed one day, but that none of the
early Christians supposed had been fully accomplished yet.

The early Christians were, after all, a small minority, staking
their daring and apparently crazy claim about Jesus from a
position of great weakness and vulnerability. They were perceived,
with some justification, as a threat to the established order, and
so they attracted criticism, threats, punishment, and even death.
But their threat to the present world was not of the usual kind.
They were not ordinary revolutionaries, ready to take up arms to
overthrow an existing regime and establish their own instead.
Celebrating Jesus as the world’s rightful king — as we see them
doing in our earliest documents, the letters of Paul — was indeed
a way of posing a challenge to Caesar and all other earthly
“lords.” But it was a different sort of challenge. It was not only
the announcement of Jesus as the true king, albeit still the
king-in-waiting, but the announcement of him as the true sort
of king. Addressing the ambitious pair James and John, he put it
like this: “Pagan rulers . . . lord it over their subjects. . . .
But that’s not how it’s to be with you” (Matt. 20:25-26). And, as
he said to Pilate, the kingdoms that are characteristic of “this
world” make their way by violence, but his sort of kingdom doesn’t
do that (John 18:36). We all know the irony of empires that offer
people peace, prosperity, freedom, and justice — and kill tens of
thousands of people to make the point. Jesus’s kingdom isn’t like
that. With him, the irony works the other way around. Jesus’s
death and his followers’ suffering are the means by which his
peace, freedom, and justice come to birth on earth as in heaven.

Jesus’s kingdom must come, then, by the means that
correspond to the message. It’s no good announcing love
and peace if you make angry, violent war to achieve it! That, as
we shall see, is the watchword for the “today” bit of the story of
Jesus. But what about the “tomorrow” or “forever” bit? What is the
ultimate future?

Jesus’s first followers were unequivocal: Jesus will return. He
will come again. He will reappear in power and glory, triumphing
over all the forces of death, decay, and destruction, including
the structures that have used those horrible forces to enslave and
devastate human lives. The present mode of the story is not the
end. (pp. 198-99)

In a book titled How
God Became King, you might imagine how this passage is
even more crucial. Jesus speaking about God's kingdom to Pilate is a
primary illustration of Wright arguing that the main story of the
Gospels is about how God becomes king through Jesus, and the cross
is the climactic moment of that kingship, the one that we must
understand in order to understand how God's kingship is completely
different. Wright begins with the Synoptic Gospels, where he
summarizes, "There is, in other words, a clear line all the way from
Genesis 11, via Isaiah 40–55 and Daniel 7, to Mark 10, and thereby
in turn to Mark 14-15, where Jesus meets his captors, his judges,
and his death. He not only theorizes about the difference between
pagan power and the kind of power he is claiming; he enacts it" (p.
139). He then moves to John's Gospel, where he begins in chapter 12
and especially moves through the Farewell Discourse of John 14-17.
We pick up Wright's argument there:

When, after the final prayer (chap. 17) and the arrest
and the Jewish trial (18:1-27), we find Jesus standing before
Pilate (18:28-19:16), we ought to know, because John has set it
up, what is actually going on. This is the point at which the
ruler of the world is being judged. Caesar’s kingdom will do what
Caesar’s kingdom always does, but this time God’s kingdom will win
the decisive victory.

Jesus explains (18:36) that his kingdom is not the sort that grows
in this world. His kingdom is certainly for this world,
but it isn’t from it. It comes from somewhere else — in
other words, from above, from heaven, from God. It is God’s gift
to his world, but, as John already pointed out in the prologue,
the world isn’t ready for this gift. The key is this: if Jesus’s
kingdom were the regular sort, the kind that grows all too easily
in the present world — the sort of kingdom, in fact, that James
and John had wanted! — then Jesus’s followers would be taking up
arms:

“If my kingdom were from this world, my supporters
would have fought to stop me being handed over to the Judaeans.
So then, my kingdom is not the sort that comes from here.”
(18:36)

The difference between the kingdoms is striking. Caesar’s kingdom
(and all other kingdoms that originate in this world) make their
way by fighting. But Jesus’s kingdom — God’s king-dom enacted
through Jesus — makes its way with quite a different weapon, one
that Pilate refuses to acknowledge: telling the truth:

“So!” said Pilate. “You are a king, are you?”

“You’re the one who’s calling me a king,” replied Jesus. “I was
born for this; I’ve come into the world for this: to give
evidence about the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth
listens to my voice.”

“Truth!” said Pilate. “What’s that?” (18:37-38)

The point about truth, and about Jesus and his followers bearing
witness to it, is that truth is what happens when humans use words
to reflect God’s wise ordering of the world and so shine light
into its dark corners, bringing judgment and mercy where it is
badly needed. Empires can’t cope with this. They make their own
“truth,” creating “facts on the ground” in the depressingly normal
way of violence and injustice. (pp. 144-45)

Wright moves through the rest of John 18-19 on these pages,
climaxing with the title "King of the Jews" that Pilate places above
his head. But let's move to the next time Wright brings in John
18:33-37, where he reverses the order by beginning with the irony of
that title:

The title is, of course, heavily ironic. Pilate knows
that Jesus doesn’t conform to any meaning of the word “king” with
which he is familiar. Jesus himself, as we saw, had redefined
“kingship” in his conversation with the governor, insisting that
his kind of kingship meant bearing witness to the truth (18:37).
But now readers are invited to join together the two points, which
Pilate was never going to do — the two points that, ironically,
much Christian interpretation has also found very hard to combine.
Readers are invited to join together not simply a Johannine
“incarnational” theology with a Johannine “redemption” theology.
Both of those are there, but the middle term between them is once
again the evangelist’s kingdom theology. As Paul saw, the
rulers of this age didn’t understand what they were doing when
they crucified the Lord of glory (1 Cor. 2:8). As the
Irish-American New Testament scholar Dominic Crossan commented on
Matthew’s story of Pilate’s wife having bad dreams about Jesus
(Matt. 27:19), it was time for the Roman Empire to start having
nightmares. Sending Jesus to his death was assisting in the
enthronement of the one whose bringing of justice to the nations
flowed out of his sovereign, healing love (John 13:1).

The point for our present purpose is that, in all four gospels,
readers are strongly urged to see Jesus’s death as explicitly
“royal,” explicitly “messianic” — in other words, explicitly to do
with the coming of the “kingdom.” Jesus has, all along, been
announcing that God’s kingdom was coming. His followers might well
have expected that this announcement would lead to a march on
Jerusalem, where Jesus would do whatever it took to complete what
he had begun. And they were right — but not at all in the sense
they expected or wanted. That is what the evangelists are saying
through this particular moment in the story. This is how the
kingdom is to come, the kingdom of God, which Jesus has been
announcing and, as Messiah, inaugurating.

This point needs little elaboration in relation to the synoptic
gospels, but we may continue to stress it in relation to John, who
is not so often seen as a theologian of the “kingdom.” In fact,
however, as we have already seen, John 18-19 offers an explosion
of dense and detailed kingdom theology, so that when we meet the titulus
in John 19:19, we read it with a special and heightened irony,
coming as it does at the conclusion of Pilate’s debate with Jesus,
on the one hand, and with the Jewish leaders, on the other, about
kingdom, truth, power, and Caesar. Jesus, John is saying, is the
true king whose kingdom comes in a totally unexpected fashion,
folly to the Roman governor and a scandal to the Jewish leaders.

In all four gospels, then, there is no drawing back. This is the
coming of the kingdom, the sovereign rule of Israel’s God arriving
on earth as in heaven, exercised through David’s true son and
heir. It comes through his death. The fact that the kingdom is
redefined by the cross doesn’t mean that it isn’t still the
kingdom. The fact that the cross is the kingdom-bringing event
doesn’t mean that it isn’t still an act of horrible and brutal
injustice, on the one hand, and powerful, rescuing divine love, on
the other. The two meanings are brought into dramatic and shocking
but permanent relation. (pp. 219-20)

Wright draws everything together in the final citations of John 18,
that the cross is the work of God's loves to rescue this world by
inaugurating the New Creation in the resurrection. Here is one
final, majestic excerpt from this amazing, essential-to-read book
(click on the links to get a copy of How
God Became King if you don't already own one; for
example, the summary of this chapter on pp. 240-45 is not be
missed):

Indeed, once we realize what the evangelists are doing
throughout, we should expect that the stories of the hearings and
trials, in all the gospels, may be assumed to serve this purpose,
rather than just giving some backstory to Calvary. The trials, in
other words, address the theological and soteriological
“why” of the cross, not only the “how.” Learning to read them in
this way may be a novel art, but it is one we Western Christians
should acquire as soon as possible. John is a good place to start.

I have already written in some detail about John 18-19 and tried
to show that, in the great scene of Jesus (and the chief priests)
before Pilate, John has said an enormous amount about the
significance of Jesus’s forthcoming death. John’s great scene
between Jesus and Pilate is all about the “kingdom,” even though
it takes place under the shadow of the cross; or, to put it the
other way, it is all about the reasons for the cross, and those
reasons turn out to be kingdom reasons. The link between kingdom
and cross forms the inner logic of the whole narrative, stressing
both the inevitability and the necessity (in human terms, it was
bound to happen; in the divine plan, it had to happen) of the
kingdom of which Jesus speaks being put into effect by his
forthcoming death.

Jesus once again takes the initiative in the conversation,
introducing the discussion of different types of “kingdoms.” “My
kingdom isn’t the sort that grows in this world,” he says (18:36).
(We note here that the regular translation, “My kingdom is not of
this world,” has contributed to, and in its turn also generated,
multiple misreadings of all four gospels, appearing to suggest
that Jesus’s “kingdom” is straightforwardly “otherworldly.” The
Greek for “of this world” is ek tou kosmou toutou; the ek,
meaning “out of” or “from,” is the crucial word.) There is no
question but that Jesus is speaking of a “kingdom” in and for
this world. The steady buildup, over the previous chapters, of
sayings, already noted, about “the ruler of this world” being
judged and cast out and about the world being overcome make it
clear that in the events now unfolding we are to see the ultimate
showdown between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of the world
brought to sharp focus in Jesus and Pilate.

Part of John’s meaning of the cross, then, is that it is not only
what happens, purely pragmatically, when God’s kingdom challenges
Caesar’s kingdom. It is also what has to happen if God’s
kingdom, which makes its way (as Jesus insists) by nonviolence
rather than by violence, is to win the day. This is the “truth” to
which Jesus has come to bear witness, the “truth” for which
Pilate’s worldview has no possible space (18:38). It is at once
exemplified, dramatically, by Jesus taking the place of Barabbas
the brigand (18:38-40). This is the “truth” to which Jesus bears
witness — the truth of a kingdom accomplished by the innocent
dying in place of the guilty.

And, in the broader Johannine perspective, we discover that the
only word to do justice to this kingdom-and-cross combination is agape,
“love.” The death of Jesus is the expression of God’s love, as the
famous verse in John 3:16 makes clear....

How fatally easy it would be for us Westerners to sigh with relief
at this point. Ah, we think, God’s kingdom is simply the sum total
of all the souls who respond in faith to God’s love. It isn’t a
real kingdom in space, time, and matter. It’s a spiritual reality,
“not of this world.” John, though, will not collude with this
Platonic shrinkage. We remind ourselves of the earlier passages
about the ruler of this world being cast out, condemned, and
overthrown. These appear to refer to a being that stands behind
the present earthly rulers, but also incarnates itself in them; we
are not simply talking about a “spiritual” victory that leaves the
present human rulers unaffected.

For another thing, the resurrection scenes in John 20-21 are not
about a heavenly existence, detached from this world, but
precisely about new creation, the new Genesis arrived at last. The
famous tetelestai in 19:30 (“It’s all done!”) matches the
synetelesen in Genesis 2:2 (“God finished the work that he
had done”); on the sixth day, in both accounts, God finished all
the work that he had begun and rested on the seventh. The
resurrection, as John stresses, happens on the first day of the
week (20:1, 19). Mary is sent to tell the others that Jesus is to
be enthroned beside the Father (20:17); Peter, to feed and tend
the flock (21:15-17). This is how the kingdom, which is from
above, is coming into this world. The work of
redemption is complete; now, with Jesus having been “glorified,”
having completed his work of rescuing his people, the Spirit can
be given, and his followers can begin their own work. This is how
— remembering how thoroughly it has been redefined! — God’s
kingdom will come on earth as in heaven. The cross serves the
goal of the kingdom, just as the kingdom is accomplished
by Jesus’s victory on the cross. (pp. 229-30, 231-32)

4. Brian McLaren, Everything
Must Change, pp. 113-115, 184. In this landmark book,
McLaren is arguing that our cultural "framing stories" (a term which
many modern folks use "myths" to designate) are leading us into
suicide. God in Jesus Christ is offering us the way to life through
offering us an alternative framing story that leads to life. But
first Christians have to reframe the Jesus framing story, because
the original story, which was counter-imperial, was reframed in
Christendom to fit into our imperialistic framing stories. Part 3 of
the book consists of five chapters on "Reframing Jesus," on
returning the Jesus story to its original status as a
counter-imperial alternative to the reigning framing stories. Within
the fifth chapter of Part 3, "Or So It Appeared" (ch. 14), McLaren
climaxes his argument with two Gospel stories: Peter's Declaration
at Caesarea Philippi (Matt 16) and Jesus Before Pilate in John
18-19. After noting that John's Gospel uses language about "life in
the age to come" (usually translated as "eternal life"), here John's
Jesus very much uses the "kingdom" language of the Synoptic Gospels.
McLaren writes:

Yes, Jesus is a king. But his kingdom is “not of this
world.” What does this mean? Does it mean Jesus is promoting a
“spiritual” kingdom, something people feel warming their hearts,
or something they will experience after they die? Hardly. Jesus
has just used a similar “not of the world” construction in the
previous chapter, as part of a rich and lengthy prayer. There
Jesus makes it clear that he doesn’t want his disciples to be
removed “out of the world.” Instead, he sends them “into the
world,” but as they are “in” the world, they are not to be “of”
the world, just as he is not “of” the world (John 17:13-19).

“My kingdom is not of this world,” then, means the very opposite
of “My kingdom is not in this world.” Instead, it means my kingdom
is very much in this world, but it doesn’t work the way earthly
kingdoms or empires do. The word this becomes especially
significant in relation to Pilate’s location in the Roman chain of
command: this world of Pilate, of Roman swords and spears
and threats of crucifixion, of imperial domination and hierarchy
and violence — this world is not the origin or character
of Jesus’ kingdom.

Then Jesus specifies: earthly kingdoms fight, but his kingdom,
being “from another place,” has another nature and another
strategy. Instead of winning by violence and domination, his
kingdom simply tells the truth and sees who listens: “for this
reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify
to the truth” (John 18:37). (p. 114)

He includes this endnote with corroboration from Paul:

These important words spoken to Pilate continue echoing
strongly among the early followers of Jesus, decades later:
“Although we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world
does” (2 Corinthians 10:3). We do not fight with fleshly weapons
against flesh and blood — as if human beings were our enemies. No,
we struggle against dark spiritual forces that are described as
thoughts, arguments, pretensions, faulty reasoning. And we do not
use the kinds of physical weapons used by typical kingdoms —
swords, spears, or shields (Ephesians 6:10-18). Instead, we engage
the falsehood and deception so prevalent in the world with
“unarmed” truth, prayer, justice, alertness, peace, faith.
(Endnote 6 on p. 114, which appears on p. 312)

Finally, in a chapter on how Christians might see ourselves as
"Joining Warriors Anonymous," seeking to slowly change imperialism's
approach to security, McLaren cites John 18:36 and then ends the
chapter with an excellent quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a
descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.
Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. . . . Hate
multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness
multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. . . .
The chain reaction of evil — hate begetting hate, wars producing
more wars — must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark
abyss of annihilation. (p. 185 in McLaren, citing King's Strength
to Love, [New York: HarperCollins, 1963])

In a magnificently parabolic scene in John’s gospel,
Pilate confronts Jesus (or does Jesus confront Pilate?) about the
kingdom he proclaims. “My kingdom,” says Jesus in the King James
Version of the incident, “is not of this world: if my kingdom were
of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be
delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence”
(18:36). I take five foundational points from that brief
interchange.

First, Jesus opposes the Kingdom of God to the kingdoms of “this
world.” What “this world” means is discussed throughout this book,
but especially in chapter 1, whose title, “Empire and the
Barbarism of Civilization,” is my own translation of the “this
world” of Jesus.

Second, Jesus is condemned to death by Roman Pilate, in Roman
Judea, in the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire. But he never
mentions Rome as such, and he never addresses Pilate by name.

Third, had Jesus stopped after saying that “my kingdom is not of
this world,” as we so often do in quoting him, that “of” would be
utterly ambiguous. “Not of this world” could mean: never on earth,
but always in heaven; or not now in present time, but off in the
imminent or distant future; or not a matter of the exterior world,
but of the interior life alone. Jesus spoils all of these possible
misinterpretations by continuing with this: “if my kingdom were of
this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be
delivered” up to execution. Your soldiers hold me, Pilate, but my
companions will not attack you even to save me from death.Your
Roman Empire, Pilate, is based on the injustice of violence, but
my divine kingdom is based on the justice of nonviolence.

Fourth, the crucial difference — and the only one mentioned —
between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Rome is Jesus’s
nonviolence and Pilate’s violence. The violence of Roman
imperialism, however, was but one incarnation at that
first-century time and in that Mediterranean place of “this world”
— that is, of the violent normalcy of civilization itself (see my
first point).

Fifth, the most important interpreter of Jesus in the entire New
Testament is Pilate. He clearly recognizes the difference between
Barabbas and Jesus. Barabbas is a violent revolutionary who “was
in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the
insurrection” (Mark 15:7). Pilate arrested Barabbas along with
those of his followers he could capture. But Jesus is a nonviolent
revolutionary, so Pilate has made no attempt to round up his
companions. Both Barabbas and Jesus oppose Roman injustice in the
Jewish homeland, but Pilate knows exactly and correctly how to
calibrate their divergent oppositions.

I emphasize that contrast between Pilate’s Kingdom of Rome as
violent repression and Jesus’s Kingdom of God as nonviolent
resistance because that juxtaposition is the heart of this book,
which is an attempt to rethink God, the Bible, and empire, Jesus,
Christianity, and Rome. Jesus could have told Pilate that Rome’s
rule was unjust and God’s rule was just. That would have been
true, but it would have avoided the issue of whether God’s just
rule was to be established by human or divine violence. So,
beneath the problem of empire is the problem of justice, but
beneath the problem of justice is the problem of violence. (pp.
3-5)

6. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, sermon
from November 22, 2009 (Society of St. John, Palo Alto, CA).

1. In 2012 the main point of my sermon, "Transformation Through Faithful
Listening," centered on Jesus' voice of truth. It's not just
that the politics of God's kingdom have a different content than
our politics, the process is different. Human politics use force
to get get quick results. God's politics proceed by conversation
in covenant relationship, a much slower process.

2. Another passage that has been prominent for me in reflecting
on these texts this week is 1 Cor. 1:18-31. We preach this
scandalous gospel of a king who was summarily executed on the
cross. And then God has chosen the weak and foolish to be
followers of this king. None of us, including Christ, appears very
noble or royal by the standards of this world. But by God's
standards we manifest the wisdom of God and the power of God.

3. We finished this past week [in 1997] our fall session of
confirmation classes on the Old Testament. As I sought to conclude
with the big picture of what the OT might be trying to show us, I
focused on the theme of chosenness. What does it mean to be chosen
by God? Who are the chosen people of God in the OT? The big
picture seems to reveal precisely what St. Paul concludes in 1
Cor. 1:18-31. God's chosen people are a people whose high point
was first a liberation from slavery, the Exodus, and then a brief
reign of two strong kings (around 1000-820 B.C.) Both of these
high points are somewhat ambiguous, as the liberation was followed
by a period of grumbling and wandering in the wilderness, and the
reigns of both David and Solomon saw their share of turmoil.
Overall, the history of Israel's children is one of being in
bondage to the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians,
Greeks, Syrians, and Romans. It was into this history that God
chose a new Christ who was a poor carpenter's son, born in a barn
and executed on a cross. And who are we who follow as his
disciples?